Run, Rabbit, Run
by PandaPrinzessin
Summary: Late for an important date, caged, or running- Soubi and Ritsuka, amongst others ponder where to go from here, after Seimei reclaims Soubi. A multichapter story that negates its own attempt to be all serious and literary by including a Britney Spears reference.


It's a Sunday afternoon. The tail-end of the week, dragging time out to an unnecessary length. It doesn't matter what time it is, time and space have become endless for Soubi and he finds himself likening the feeling to the feeling of believing Seimei to be dead. Time had seemed cruel, taunting him with his own youth. _You're only twenty and your life is already over but you have to keep living it anyway... How do you like that, you walking corpse? _If it seemed difficult then, the idea of the rest of his life seems unbearable now- life without a light but with the memory of what it was like not to be in the dark. Ritsuka. A candle flame in the rain that somehow managed to keep burning, brighter than the sun and warmer than a beating heart. The only part of the day that makes it less awful is the few seconds waking in the morning where Soubi thinks he can hear the warm bubble of Ritsuka's breathing, his feet fidgeting with the quilt as he stretches, before he realises he's alone, that Ritsuka doesn't know where he is and that he'll be under six feet of cold ground before Seimei ever lets him go.

When Seimei doesn't feel like picking a fight with any other bonded pairs, Soubi is left to his own devices, which mostly means he'll sit on the sofa and watch Nakahira clean the floor around him or try to get him to eat. He doesn't try to explain any more why all food makes him want to throw up, he just takes a spoonful or two and empties the bowl into the flowerbed outside later. Today is no different- Nakahira has just finished vacuuming the living room and he flops down on the sofa next to Soubi, reaching for the remote and flicking the TV on. Nakahira watches an astounding amount of television when he's not cleaning or cooking, particularly the American music channels. Soubi supposes this is because they're about as far removed from the house as possible- inhabited by beautiful girls in bikini tops, where everyone has fabulous cars and falls in love neatly and nobody speaks Japanese. Soubi's own escapism is more painful. He can't not think of Ritsuka because this would be to admit that there is no chance of seeing him again; Ritsuka is the board from the sinking ship keeping him from drowning. Sensei would probably find it funny that the bright spark of Soubi's life causes him physical pain to think about- literally physical because when he thinks about Ritsuka for too long, Beloved begins to leak blood through his neck bandages. He supposes that now Seimei has chosen to tie the bond back on again, disloyalty has a stronger effect, if he tried to leave he'd probably be dead before he made it a hundred metres from the building.

Nakahira flips through the channels, settling at last on a reel of MTV classics, which as far as Soubi can tell just means old videos. There's a teenage girl in a school uniform with her shirt tied up to reveal her bare midriff, twirling in what appears to be the hallway of a high school (though he wouldn't know, he never went to high school). Her pigtails are secured with fluffy pink pompoms and Soubi can't understand a word she's singing. He'd never learned more than a few basic phrases in English (Ritsuka speaks it well, virtually without an accent, the gift of an ordinary education) though he has a hazy memory of his mother speaking Swedish to him, so with his impressionable child's brain he must have at one point been able to speak or at least understand it too.

_Jag älskar dig. His mother's long, light hair brushing his face. _Still, he finds himself wanting to know what she's singing about, this girl who can't be more than three or four years older than Ritsuka.

"What is she saying?" he asks Nakahira, who looks startled at the first voluntary words Soubi's spoken to him in weeks.

"_My loneliness is killing me," _he translates along with the song, "_Don't you know I still believe, that you will be here and give me a sign..." _Nakahira trails off.

"My English isn't very good," he finishes, "I dropped it as soon as it stopped being mandatory at school but I still remember some."

Soubi nods in thanks. Loneliness doesn't kill, he wants to say, it would be far easier to be lonely if you knew that it would eventually kill you. It's the process of dying that stretches out too far. He can't stand the idea of thirty or forty years (if he dodges lung cancer) like this. Human pain, after all, assumes that the pain will at some point end or remembers when it began and so he believes that this can't last forever.

Reunion. In some way or another, Soubi thinks that's maybe all he has ever wanted.

"You know why I'm here?" he addresses Nakahira. Soubi feels as though he's watching himself from a great distance, about to cut his finger with a knife and feeling too far removed to care.

Nakahira openly gapes at Soubi. Continuing an exchange of words, instead of sitting so still and tight-lipped that sometimes Nakahira considers jabbing him with the broom just to check the guy's still actually breathing.

"No idea. Chiyako-sama agreed to it and that's pretty much all the justification I ask for," he replies, trying to lighten the tone of the conversation (if it can even be called that).

"Even if you open the cage door, a rabbit won't run away, not if it's been kept for long enough. It might sniff around a bit outside but it will always run back into someone's cage again in the end."

_Run and get run over. _


End file.
